A Neuro-Psychological Model of the Creative Intelligence of Gifted Children

There is a vast literature concerning the relationship between creativity and high intelligence. Several models of giftedness feature creativity as a necessary component of giftedness, along with high intelligence. Consequently, several leaders in the field of gifted education such as Urban (1996; 2003), McCann (1998), have constructed their recommendations for pedagogy and differentiated curricula for academically gifted children around the promotion of creative intelligence. Here we present a neuropsychological model of high-functioning creative intelligence based on evidence from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and validated against the literature on creativity, high intelligence and giftedness (Geake and Dodson, 2004). A central concept is fluid analogising as a means by which gifted individuals exploit their relatively greater working memory capacity, and enhanced neural connectivity, for creatively intelligent outcomes.